Dose #207: Basic Changes That Help Ai Discover Your Subscription Offers

David here with your weekly Subscription Prescription 💊

Howdy! I’m David Bradley, co-founder of Subscription Prescription. Most of my time is spent working with subscription technology like Nextime.ai and our agency team, and this year I've been teaching brands about acquiring great subscribers via ChatGPT and agentic shopping.

So this summer, I'm stepping up with some expert guests on our podcast and doses that will help your brand be ready for what's happening now and what's next in growing subscriptions: AI.

Our podcast this week is about how Ai is changing how subscription brands get new subscribers now, and how brand leaders should be thinking about conversion

If you are seeing traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, and other agents, and you’re looking to convert more subscribers, then this is episode is full of insights to how different perspectives from a retention director to an Ai startup think about converting new subscribers agentically.

This week’s newsletter is also a full podcast episode, so check out the full “panel-style” episode featuring Al Salomon (SubRx + Puro Air), Hamish Gunasekara (Catalog), Matt Holman (SubRx), and me.

For your dose this week, let’s use Ai and getting new subscribers from ChatGPT, as an exciting reason to get your subscription product data right.

I know that “getting structured data right” may not be the most exciting idea, but hear me out… in just a few minutes, you can use the tips below to discover simple gaps and opportunities to be much more easily discovered by Ai… and that means your subscriptions are more likely to be discovered by your best customers!

If being discovered by your best customers is worth a few minutes, then read on…

The reason you need to nail structured data for your subscription products is to because AI already knows your customer.

Your job is to make sure it knows your product.

Think of the basics below like SEO, but for your subscription products and Ai discoverability. You want product page data that's accessible, accurate, and well-structured, a strong foundation that makes crawlers and agents aware of your subscription offer.

Here's why it matters. When a shopper asks ChatGPT or Gemini for the best option in your category to get on a subscription or autoship, the AI reads your product data to decide whether to recommend you and which offer to surface. Thin or messy data and you’re missed, or the agent points the shopper to a competitor whose data is clear. Many subscription brands are sitting on exactly this gap right now, and you can still get early wins by improving your basics.

The basics to nail, for your subscription product offers:

1. Make sure your basic product data is accessible. A title and description that say what your product is, what it's used for, and who it's for, plus identifiers like price, availability, and good images are where most brands are now. However, is this data accessible? Is it readable by machines? AI can't recommend what it can't read. If you've filled in your product data in your online store, then this is mostly handled, but it's worth confirming: run a product page URL through Google's Rich Results Test to check that your structured data is valid and crawlable.

2. Make sure your subscription offer communicates more than just a frequency choice, and go further with your offer & FAQ’s. Your subscription product pages should already state the frequencies you offer, so make sure you go farther and explain what each frequency is best used for (your frequency should map to how the product is best used or replenished), and make the subscribe price and its value obvious next to your one-time option. Label each selection with its fit, for example "Deliver every 30 days (most popular)," and use your FAQ to spell out how consumption or usage relates to the subscription frequencies offered: one unit lasts about 30 days, two last about 60. Then when ChatGPT already knows someone is shopping for two kids, it can line them up with a quantity of two on a 30-day refill without guessing.

3. Start including Google's structured data for subscription product offers . If you’re new to including subscription offers in your google product listings, you may see mixed advice about how Google expects your product page to include subscription offers. That’s because there’s a lot of changes right now in product data because of Ai, so don’t tear apart your subscribe-and-save pages in reaction to every new change. For now, here's what to get right if you list products with Google:

   1. Google supports one subscription price per landing page, so pick the default frequency that loads with the page and mark it up with the subscription_cost attribute (its period, period_length, and amount).

   2. Your structured data should match what the shopper sees on load in order for Google to be able to crawl and verify it, so a good practice right now is to ensure the default subscription frequency and the marked-up one in your good product feed need to agree. Check it with the same Rich Results Test under the Merchant Listings report, and confirm the field rules in Google's subscription cost docs. It's live for US merchants in categories like coffee, pet, personal care, and home goods right now.

   3. Be curious and test changes, but don’t miss on the basics: shopping models for Google/Gemini, Shopify and Ai/Agents are changing more often than ever, and having a strong foundation will always help you better test new opportunities & changes.

4. Add “who it's for”, and “who it's not for” to your product page content. Negative signals “not for nut-allergies” or “not for vegans” can help Ai move on from wrong products and discover the best ones quickly. Done poorly, the vegan is shown the chicken option and churns. The shopper routed to the right product or collection converts. Tell Ai who should not subscribe in addition to who should and see your conversion and retention rise. Your FAQ is a natural home for this: a short "who this is for" and "who it's not for" entry gives AI clean text to read and match against.

Ask Ai to help you! Open a top subscription product page, copy the page link or its data, and ask your AI assistant: "You're an AI shopping agent. Based only on this, would you recommend this product as a subscription, to whom, and what's missing for you to recommend it confidently?" Evaluate the gaps and opportunities, feed it this article and ask Ai to optimize this dose for your brand and your customers.

Get this foundation right and everything else, the feeds, the syndication, the agent optimization, has something solid to build on.

The full episode is live today

That's your dose for this week. The full episode with our panel is out now, and my guests Hamish, Al, and Matt get into a lot more: the personalization flip that's changing how brands get found, the two storefronts that brands are building, the FAQ page upgrade that turns into your best agent, and where the shopping protocols from companies Google, Shopify and ChatGPT are heading next.

Until next time, that’s your Subscription Prescription. 💊

 - David Bradley 🩺

www.thesubscriptiondoc.com